Any speaker cable's sound quality just blown you away?

I sometimes sound like a curmudgeon on this topic, so please forgive me in advance. First, no cable -- speaker, interconnect, etc. -- should "blow you away". If it "blows you away", it's because it is NOT sounding natural. A truly accurate cable shouldn't have any identifiable sound of its own. Second, I think the price being charged for most high-end speaker cables is obscene. It's WIRE for Pete's sake, not gold-plated latinum! Having made these two points -- and possibly raising the ire of some -- I will respond to your question and say that the best speaker wire I have owned or heard is Kimber Kable 4TC and 8TC. It's the best to my ears because, from what I can tell, it makes virtually no impact on the reproduced sound -- which is exactly what it should do. Ray Kimber for years was one of the few really sane people making high-quality speaker cable and IC's -- and I was sorry to see him jump on the high-priced bandwagon. When it comes to wire, expensive does not often translate into better. I've auditioned a fair variety of high-end speaker cables, and I keep coming back to ole' reliable: Kimber 4TC and 8TC.

When considering wire products -- be it speaker, interconnect, or whatever -- bear in mind that wire has the highest profit margin in high-end audio. This provides a HUGE dollar incentive to manufacturers and retailers to make unsubstantiated claims about the product.

Someone who has spent $5large on some garden-hose sized speaker wire, or the latest megabuck "flavor-of-the-month" interconnect, isn't going to take kindly to any suggestion that they may -- just possibly - wasted their money. There was a long thread shortly before this forum got re-vamped talking about "audio susceptibility", and it might be informative to go back and read some of the comments (including the ones I made).

Some of you may, by now, have discovered or subscribed to a new online audiophile journal written by Richard Hardesty, one of the sagest guys for years in the retail audio trade. Richard is now an editor for Widescreen Review magazine, and is publishing his own Internet journal named "The Audio Perfectionist". Here's what Richard Hardesty has to say about cables in Issue #3 of "The Audio Perfectionist":

"High-end cables are the biggest scam in audio, and some of the most expensive ones perform very poorly. But that doesn't mean that cheap ones will do or that cables aren't very important. Cables can dramatically change the sound of an audio system...Good cables are extremely important and the marketplace is a minefield of scam and hype. Anybody with a crimping tool can call himself a cable engineer these days...Don't buy an expensive cable product without carefully listening to it in your own system. Most of the mega-dollar cables are really bad and should be avoided."